Recently Flash Player 11.2 has been released recently with background updates feature for Windows, today, Adobe has released first beta of Flash Player 11.3 ( this time) by adding support for background updates for Mac. This release also adds protected mode for Firefox (in Windows only) and other features. Two months back Adobe released public beta of Sandboxed Flash player for Firefox, but the flash player version release not confirmed that time, so with this release we can assume that Flash Player 11.3 version will be released with protected mode for Firefox.
With Protected Mode enabled for Flash Player in Firefox, you can see two additional processes as children of plugin-container.exe running in Task Manager, both named as “FlashPlayerPlugin_11_3_300_214.exe". These are the broker and sandbox processes.
Flash Player 11.3 features
- Full screen keyboard input — This feature enables support for all keyboard keys available to an embedded SWF running inside of a page without full screen mode( except for ‘Esc’). It allows developers to determine if the app is in full screen, whether full keyboard input is allowed, and whether the app is able to request full screen (determined by the embed tag parameter).
- Low latency audio support for streaming audio through NetStream — This feature aims to reduce latency for high quality streaming audio playback. It addresses a very special use case of cloud gaming, where the game is rendered at a server and audio and video are streamed to the client.
- Protected Mode for Firefox — Flash Player Protected Mode is a new security enhancement designed to limit the impact of attacks launched from malicious SWF files against Adobe Flash Player when running in Firefox 4.0+ on Windows Vista and higher. This feature is comparable to the Flash Player Protected Mode in Google Chrome browser, Protected Mode in Adobe Reader, and Office 2010 Protected View.
- Flash Player background updates (Mac) — New versions of the runtimes can now be delivered more effectively to the end user with this enhanced updating mechanism (Background update is only available in the release versions of Flash Player).
- Low latency audio support (Sound API) — This enhancement reduces the latency for Sound.play method and changes to volume and pan on SoundTransform. The latency of SAMPLE_DATA event should also be reduced considerably.
- Texture Streaming for Stage3D — Provides an ability to upload coarser, lower quality textures on the GPU first and then progressively improve them as more data becomes available.
You can download Flash Player 11.3 beta for Windows and Mac from here.
Source : Adobe Labs